The present invention relates to estimation of stowage requirements of a ship, more particularly to methodologies for determining ship stowage requirements such as involving numbers, volumes, weights and areas as pertain to storage compartments and stowage aids.
The United States Navy has developed historical and empirical estimates of stowage aid weights and storage compartment volumes needed to store many common ship stores. These estimates often relate to numbers of people or specific types of subsystems existing on typical naval vessels. Generally, the estimated stowage requirements are based on reports, or technical standards, that provide the current volume and related density of shipboard stowage, such as food (e.g., frozen, chill, dry) required per day for each type of crewmember onboard (e.g., officer, CPO, enlisted). Other associated accommodation stowage influences include medical supplies, special clothing, canned soda, and ship store condiments. Often stowage demands are based on mechanical systems which that require lubrication, such as the number and type of aircraft and small boats onboard.
Such stowage estimations are especially difficult to implement during the initial feasibility level review in the context of new ship design studies. The historical approach to determining needed storeroom areas on Navy ships is to double the footprint area of the total number of stowage aids anticipated based on the aforementioned stowage material data. The estimate found by this doubling method is often found to be insufficient when the shipboard stowage requirements are realized. Thus, according to current storage estimation methodologies, the storerooms are not maximized and are not reflective of real shipboard stowage conditions.